Telling the story

Despots and dictators for millennia have known that the fastest way to destroy a people is to destroy its memory. Stamp out memory, language, tradition and resistance to the tyrant’s rule will die out in a generation (or two, at most). One lesson of the history of God’s people is that it is in the telling and retelling of the great story that adherence to God’s fidelity cannot be destroyed. For that reason, we cannot and must not ever be ashamed of “telling out the Good News” regardless of what the dominant culture says about the story we tell. I think the same holds true about our denominational identity. At its root, it is a story about God’s relationship to his people – but a denominational story tells about that relationship from a specific perspective- a perspective that rings true with many brothers and sisters in the human family. An honest analysis of the scriptures and of faith history reveals that there has never been only one way of telling the story of our immense God. The story of the Anglican way has value for the world in which we live. We cannot and must not ever be ashamed of telling that story.